The bug occurs only if you spin up the drive. And even then very rarely. Usually datacenters don't spin down their drives anyways. Does yours?
Not by choice but in a production environment with heavy demands, hardware goes bad, processes run away, kernels panic. Sometimes the box just needs to be physically moved. At some point or another it's extremely likely that these disks will be powered down before they're obsolete. It would be quite nice if the person dealing with it didn't have to take out all the disks and update them just to get the server up and running again.
Apart from that if you use cheap desktop drives instead of server drives you should at least spread the raid out across different kinds of hardware. Exactly for this kind of problem. And especially with cheap hardware.
If you run a large datacenter and that's your strategy, you're an idiot. I won't argue that heterogeneity has its advantages in certain cases, but this is NOT one of them. when you have thousands of machines to manage all with nearly identical jobs, you don't go piecing the whole farm together using random hardware just because you can. Not only is it impossible to manage, it's impossible from a maintenance standpoint. Compatibility issues are widespread in both the consumer and server-grade hardware markets and keeping track of which RAID card flakes out once a week in combination with which motherboard (for example) is a losing game. On top of that, you're actually increasing your chances of spreading dodgy hardware around the datacenter.
Sure, (you're probably arguing), you can track down issues related to a specific motherboard by seeing a pattern of problems on machines with those motherboards. But in order for that to be effective, you have to keep a database of every single piece of hardware being used in every single machine. This becomes an enormous waste of time when you have thousands of machines to look after.
It's far better to have once piece of hardware for a specific job, test that hardware as best you can, and then deploy it everywhere. Practically all deal-breaking problems are found before the hardware is too widespread to be a huge issue. We know exactly what's in our datacenter and can therefore make decisions (both managerial and technical) without having to run a database query. We chose to go almost exclusively with Seagate disks because they have (or had) a damn good reputation and an unbeatable warranty.
They let us down. We do not apologize for trying to run an efficient datacenter.
Please don't use cheap desktop hardware and then whine about it not being server grade.
I didn't ask for server-grade hardware. But I do expect that Seagate manufacture products that have been tested, then deny any problems for months, and then issue a firmware that bricks the disk. See the comment from the Seagate employee. This is a fiasco.
We use SATA everywhere that speed isn't a critical factor (because they're far cheaper than SAS/SCSI and work just splendidly with LSI and 3Ware RAID cards). This mainly means backup servers and dedicated server customers with little need for high-speed disk access and that's not a small percentage in our datacenters.
Hmm, and I'm supposed to believe that when your nickname is "maxtorman"? Your plan was cunning and clever, but your subconscious knew of your evil plot and forced you to reveal your hand!
How exactly would a memory chip define "power first applied"? And how would the memory itself erase anything?
Afaik RAM is just a bunch of cells that are either charged or they're not and it's all decided by the memory controller.
I confess to not being an EE, but I assumed that memory chips were similar to other ICs in that they have a voltage applied to the Vcc pin. If this is true, it should be possible (not necessarily easy, but possible) to have the logic gates default to zero when the voltage is applied to the Vcc pin or the RST pin.
I work for a web hosting company and we get these drives by the case. I couldn't guess how many are deployed throughout the datacenter but on some of our backup servers alone I've calculated that I have almost 100 drives that need the firmware update. Thankfully none of the disks on the systems that I admin have shown problems yet, but we try to run a quality operation and that includes preventive maintenance wherever possible.
I was all set to update the firmware on these when one of our guys found that the update rendered unusable 8 of the 8 drives he upgraded the day before Seagate pulled the update. We currently have some massive amount of Western Digital 500GB and 750GB disks on rush order as a result of this debacle. It wouldn't surprise me if management tells us to swap the Seagate disks for the WDs and decides to just sell the whole lot of Seagate disks off in bulk as defective. It would be cheaper than paying people to update each one by hand.
Before this, Seagate used to mean "quality" in my opinion as their failure rate seemed to be lower than the competition and their 5-year warranty was unmatched. For the average home user, this situation is a headache. For people running datacenters filled with these disks, it's an outright fiasco.
In the case of a school, they are not the police and do not have the authority of the police (despite some administrators thinking that they do).
Constitutional rights and privilege do not extend to school grounds. School administrators and faculty routinely discriminate, silence independent speech, and perform searches and property seizure without warrants or probable cause. And all with the parents' support.
I'm trying to find a site to stream the video from on Firefox in Linux.
Somebody recommended Cnet.com, but I don't see any live video there. I thought C-SPAN would be a good bet since their streams are usually terrific (and playable with MPlayer, etc) but their site is too swamped right now to bring up anything but a blue page.
Now, I'm a pretty young whippersnapper (almost 30) but I cannot even recall reading about another presidential election that's generated this much hoopla. From the primaries, to the election, to the inauguration, it's all been full-throttle excitement. And not just from the press, but people on the street as well. Even my bigoted father and step-mother think he's just great.
Is it because:
A) He's the first halfway intelligent president our generation has seen?
B) He has the most fucking fantastic marketing department ever?
C) He's the first not-exclusively-white guy to take office?
D) The Internet is enabling average people to express their opinions and reach out to each other more easily than ever before?
E) Pretty much everyone wants Bush out of the White House, even the most right-leaning republicans?
So are we witnessing history here (and not just because of the race thing) or has there been another presidential election with this much carnival atmosphere to the whole thing? This is a serious question. Ya know, for old people. (And historians.)
This sounds like quite an over-complicated solution. Isn't it possible to design "secure" memory chips that zero their contents when power is first applied? I mean, memory chips are pretty "dumb" (from a design logic perspective, which is why cold-boot attacks work) so how hard would it really be to add this function to the chip? If it significantly adds to the manufacturing cost, sell it as a feature. I know of many agencies and individuals who would be interested in memory that's secure against cold-boot attacks, even if it costs twice per MB as normal chips.
Yes, commissioned salespeople are more motivated. More motivated to blatantly lie about a product's capabilities, the list price of an item, the store's warranty policies, and pretty much anything else they think they can get away with in order to make a sale and get that commission into their hands.
I can usually tell when a salesperson is trying to BS me on a technology-related item. Unfortunately, I'm the corner case. 95% of the people who walk into a Circuit City don't know anything about the products being sold and rely on the salesperson to education them.
And don't get me started on the extended warranty crap. They tried to sell me an extended warranty for a $20 mouse once. I'm normally a very shy person in public, but in that case I couldn't help explaining very slowly to the cashier that an extended warranty for computer mouse was by far the dumbest thing I'd ever heard of and to even mention it was an insult to my intelligence and a clear reflection of theirs.
No sir, I won't be said to see Circuit City go. I just hope whatever springs up in their place isn't even worse.
This case is the perfect example what happens when your predatory business model is threatened to be exposed.
The record companies want to deter people from sharing music, so they make all this fuss about how illegal it is, and how you'll go to jail if you download music for free off the Internet, all the while literally lying to consumers about how copyright really works.
But since they're the ones selling the music, they don't want to look like the bad guys. They want you to be afraid of the police and the court system, not them. That's why they hide behind the RIAA moniker. But the court documents, I've noticed, usually refer to the record companies by name instead of that of their trade association. and they know they'll come out looking really evil to the public and press when the caption on the video stream says, "Sony BMG suing random guy for $1 million over 7 songs".
They only reason that they haven't been heavily penalized yet for all this frivolous litigation is that it hasn't yet caught widespread public attention. And as long as there isn't much of that, they'll keep on doing it.
Uh... apologies if I'm being stupid here, but why didn't you just make it three eight hour shifts, early/day/night (one of you 2-10am, one of you 10am-6pm, one of you 6pm-2am or some such) like factory workers?
Because I wasn't the one who picked the schedule. It was the guy who outranked me and was technically therefore my boss.
You know how everyone wanted a Linux-based operating system that "just worked" on a wide variety of hardware with drivers for everything? And didn't throw a shit-fit if you moved the hard disk to a completely different machine and tried to boot it up?
That's why Linux takes so long to boot these days. You can have very good hardware compatibility or you can have very good boot speed. You can't have both. (Well, until someone invents persistent RAM.)
Why does it take so long to discover those drives and other devices? Why does a CD-ROM drive take hundreds of milliseconds to be recognized during a POST? These things should happen basically instantly at modern hardware speeds, and yet they don't.
The CD-ROM does respond to the BIOS very quickly. What takes forever is the BIOS checking each controller, chain, and bus location for a device. Waiting for those probes to time out is what takes so long. This isn't just the BIOS either, it's the Linux kernel too and any OS that might want to speak to whatever hardware might happen to be there.
. Even at that time, we were running 10 MBit or maybe 100 MBit network connections; if the remote system is going to respond, it's going to happen at MOST after a few second delay. Waiting for minutes just seems dumb.
Seems dumb to you, the user. Didn't seem dumb to the programmers who wrote NFS and whatever application you were using. Why? NFS is 1) a block device, and 2) largely a hack. The way UNIX was designed, block devices just don't disappear from the system. Just like wheels (ideally) don't go flying off your car while you're driving down the road. But when NFS, a block device can suddenly go unavailable and as far as the OS is concerned, that's just really really bad for all sorts of reasons. The programmers figured that in order to make the system as robust as possible, they'd extend the timeout as long as tolerable to reduce the chances of data loss and corruption as much as possible. It's conceivable that a large number of problems could be resolved in a matter minutes (say, somebody tripped over the power cord for the network switch), thus preventing the loss of what could be very valuable data.
The same sort of thing happens alot with web browsers too that wait far too long for servers to time out. If the server doesn't respond in 10 seconds, it's not going to respond. Ever. There's no reason to wait 30 seconds or longer to timeout an HTTP connection...
You click a mouse button. This initiates a request which, after all of the appropriate nameservers have been consulted, hops from your machine over dozens of routers, switches, and cables owned by different countries and corporations. It travels thousands of miles away to some place you can't even pronounce. Once there, the server recognises the request and acts on it, sending you back a mix of static content, images, and database content several orders of magnitude greater in size than your original request. The content then travels back to you another few thousand miles, perhaps via a different path until it eventually reaches your machine where it is processed and displayed in a mostly-legible fashion. And you have the gall to complain that sometimes it takes longer than 10 seconds for all of this to happen?
Good. Fucking. Grief.
I'm continually amazed that it works at all and I'm a sysadmin at a web hosting company. Almost every day I run across a site I want to visit that takes longer than 10 seconds to respond in full. There are lots of very good reasons that a website might take between 10-30 seconds to load in your browser. The authors of the HTTP protocol, web server software, and web browsers having a personal grudge against you sure isn't one of them.
Why don't they instead just allow linking to youtube videos without the WP nazis removing them?
First, presumably the article probably means Wikimedia Commons rather than Wikipedia itself. That said, one of Wikipedia's biggest goals is to have all media content as open and accessible as possible. They accept only free, open, and unencumbered file formats.
YouTube is pretty much the exact opposite of Wikipedia. That is, you cannot download the content for your own use or to redistribute it, there is no open source software that can easily view YouTube content, there is no intelligent discussion of said content (only "omfg americas r soooo dumb"), and nobody except YouTube employees are allowed to express an opinion on whether or not the content is suitable for deletion. And finally, there is no certification that the content being viewed is in the public domain or is being used within the bounds of fair use.
No power supply needed for each machine. This removes a major point of failure. Instead, one would need to just step down voltages to the 5 and 12 volt rails.
So you want to get rid of the power supply (a device that steps down voltage to 5 and 12 volts) and replace it with a device that steps down the voltage to 5 and 12 volts. Which one of these is not a power supply again?:)
This also helps with cooling because the room AC/DC converter can be cooled with a dedicated system, either liquid, or part of the HVAC system.
Not really. Take any random computer (especially a server) and the heat generated by the power supply is usually quite a bit less than that generated by the CPU and hard disks. (Put your hand behind a power supply fan and it'll feel quite warm but remember that fan is sucking hot air out of the case that wasn't necessarily generated by the power supply.) The only time a computer power supply really starts to heat up is if it's being pushed to its limit or is highly inefficient, both of which are error conditions rather than normal operation.
I agree 100%. I used to think the KDE/GNOME divide was bad for the Linux desktop. Then KDE4 came out and as much as I'm no big fan of GNOME, I was glad it was there because KDE4 sucked too hard to be my daily desktop. Hopefully 4.2 will bring back the stability and flexibility of 3.5.x, but we'll see.
This doesn't answer the poster's question in the least (hey, this is Slashdot after all), but the wackiest schedule I ever worked was when I was deployed to Turkey in the military for 2 weeks.
There were only three of us to cover one around-the-clock job: a staff sergeant, another airman, and me. The sergeant made it so that both he and the other airman worked two consecutive 12-hour shifts and then had a full day off. The only way you can do that, though, is to make the third guy pull a 12-hour shift with the next 24 hours off with no "break" in the schedule. Think about it: 12 then 24. My work shift (and hence my off-hours) were completely inverted each cycle.
I was definitely pissed about it at first. But it's the military, who am I going to complain to? I went along with it, consoling myself that it was only for two weeks. But man, I gotta tell you, I got used to it in just a few days. You would think that it would be impossible to get used to a schedule where one day you're going to sleep at 6AM and the next day at 6PM, but it worked fine for me because it meant that I got to sleep for 8 hours straight and then wander the base (or do whatever) for another 8. It was because of this schedule that I got to get off base for awhile and go on some tours of the country.
I could almost do that schedule again over here since my sysadmin job doesn't tie me to any specific hours, but my wife would never agree to it. The biggest downfall is that I'd never get a "real" weekend without using up vacation time.
And of course, I do as well. Someone I used to work with (in I.T.) was not even 20 years old by the time he crashed his first plane. That was during his time off, when he wasn't busy crashing our Cisco routers.
I wonder how many airports are out there that have a path from the runway to the road that isn't fenced off or have some other barrier to getting this craft on the road.
All of them. Even the smallest airfield has at least one non-obstructed entrance to the ramp. They have to so that emergency vehicles can get to the runway if somebody's coming in for a crash landing. Larger airports usually have multiple (albeit guarded) gates.
If you were flying into an airport in one of these "flying cars," there no physical reason you couldn't make your landing, taxi onto the ramp, and then drive off the ramp and onto the road with the rest of the motorists. The main obstruction I see would be procedural. I'm not a pilot, but just as you wouldn't be able to drive to the airport and take right off without filing a flight plan first (per the FAA), I'm pretty sure you wouldn't be able to do the reverse without some paperwork or inspection holding you up for awhile.
So what else can you do, really? Must be something that doesn't cause negative publicity. You might try adding a positive review to the forum under a pseudonym. But if anyone finds out about this, you have caused even more harm to your reputation.
You rebuke the accusations with evidence.
I work for a mid-size web hosting company and due to the sheer volume of customers that we have, sometimes we get a couple of unhappy ones that end up making a public forum or blog post badmouthing the company. Our marketing team keeps an eye out for these and tries to work with the disgruntled customer to get the situation resolved and (ideally) make them a happy customer again. If you can't make them happy, then at least you've still come out ahead for trying.
In one case, we had a network outage in the middle of the night that caused about a third of our datacenter to lose outside connectivity for a little over three hours. This prompted one guy to post a video on the web of him ranting and raving for about 15 minutes about how bad our company was. He posted links to it on all the web hosting forums and a couple of his blogs so we found out about it pretty quickly. We were able to publicly debunk literally every claim he made. He said that his server was down all day when in reality he was logged into it just two hours before the outage. He said that his server had to be rebooted daily. Our records show that it was rebooted twice since he owned it. He said that the support staff was rude to him. Our notes show that he almost always demanded to speak to a supervisor whenever he called in. It went on and on. In his own blog, we offered to fix whatever he thought was wrong and give him a year of free hosting (worth several thousand dollars) if he would take the video down. He refused. By the time we threw in the towel, 90% of the comments on his own blog were of other people calling him an idiot and we gained several new customers that day who said they were impressed by our professionalism in that post.
The point here is that except in very rare circumstances, it's possible to rebuke false statements publicly and effectively if they are actually false. I see the threat of libel and defamation suits being used primarily to silence valid criticism and opinion than to "clear the name" of a supposedly aggrieved party. More often than not, the party filing the suit does have something to hide and just want to abuse the court system to harass and intimidate their critics into silence. And unfortunately, it works because libel, slander, and defamation laws trump the First Amendment.
When one poor, desperate country starts to get wealthy, corporations will simply move to the next one, and let the first slip back into poverty.
Okay. So what you're saying is that since England, the United States, and Canada were the first developed industrialized countries on the globe, they'll be the first to get thrown back into the third world.
Excuse me if I'm just a little skeptical of that scenario.
something not being known yet doesnt mean it doesnt exist.
Strictly speaking this is true, but it's not a valid defense against criticism.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. There is not just little evidence, there is zero evidence that wifi radio signals affect human physiology in any way.
From my home office I can usually pick up 8 or 9 wifi signals and that's not counting all the other 2.4GHz systems in my home and neighborhood. Practically every square inch of the developed world has anywhere from dozens to thousands of both weak and strong radio signals flying through the air at all times. You just don't know about them because you're not the user of those signals. Office buildings and apartments are perhaps the worst. If wifi were harmful as some say, almost all of the urban population in developed countries would be sick or dead already.
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Not by choice but in a production environment with heavy demands, hardware goes bad, processes run away, kernels panic. Sometimes the box just needs to be physically moved. At some point or another it's extremely likely that these disks will be powered down before they're obsolete. It would be quite nice if the person dealing with it didn't have to take out all the disks and update them just to get the server up and running again.
If you run a large datacenter and that's your strategy, you're an idiot. I won't argue that heterogeneity has its advantages in certain cases, but this is NOT one of them. when you have thousands of machines to manage all with nearly identical jobs, you don't go piecing the whole farm together using random hardware just because you can. Not only is it impossible to manage, it's impossible from a maintenance standpoint. Compatibility issues are widespread in both the consumer and server-grade hardware markets and keeping track of which RAID card flakes out once a week in combination with which motherboard (for example) is a losing game. On top of that, you're actually increasing your chances of spreading dodgy hardware around the datacenter.
Sure, (you're probably arguing), you can track down issues related to a specific motherboard by seeing a pattern of problems on machines with those motherboards. But in order for that to be effective, you have to keep a database of every single piece of hardware being used in every single machine. This becomes an enormous waste of time when you have thousands of machines to look after.
It's far better to have once piece of hardware for a specific job, test that hardware as best you can, and then deploy it everywhere. Practically all deal-breaking problems are found before the hardware is too widespread to be a huge issue. We know exactly what's in our datacenter and can therefore make decisions (both managerial and technical) without having to run a database query. We chose to go almost exclusively with Seagate disks because they have (or had) a damn good reputation and an unbeatable warranty.
They let us down. We do not apologize for trying to run an efficient datacenter.
I didn't ask for server-grade hardware. But I do expect that Seagate manufacture products that have been tested, then deny any problems for months, and then issue a firmware that bricks the disk. See the comment from the Seagate employee. This is a fiasco.
We use SATA everywhere that speed isn't a critical factor (because they're far cheaper than SAS/SCSI and work just splendidly with LSI and 3Ware RAID cards). This mainly means backup servers and dedicated server customers with little need for high-speed disk access and that's not a small percentage in our datacenters.
Hmm, and I'm supposed to believe that when your nickname is "maxtorman"? Your plan was cunning and clever, but your subconscious knew of your evil plot and forced you to reveal your hand!
And of course the results of their experiment are submitted in the form of a research paper. Hmm, I wonder...
I confess to not being an EE, but I assumed that memory chips were similar to other ICs in that they have a voltage applied to the Vcc pin. If this is true, it should be possible (not necessarily easy, but possible) to have the logic gates default to zero when the voltage is applied to the Vcc pin or the RST pin.
I work for a web hosting company and we get these drives by the case. I couldn't guess how many are deployed throughout the datacenter but on some of our backup servers alone I've calculated that I have almost 100 drives that need the firmware update. Thankfully none of the disks on the systems that I admin have shown problems yet, but we try to run a quality operation and that includes preventive maintenance wherever possible.
I was all set to update the firmware on these when one of our guys found that the update rendered unusable 8 of the 8 drives he upgraded the day before Seagate pulled the update. We currently have some massive amount of Western Digital 500GB and 750GB disks on rush order as a result of this debacle. It wouldn't surprise me if management tells us to swap the Seagate disks for the WDs and decides to just sell the whole lot of Seagate disks off in bulk as defective. It would be cheaper than paying people to update each one by hand.
Before this, Seagate used to mean "quality" in my opinion as their failure rate seemed to be lower than the competition and their 5-year warranty was unmatched. For the average home user, this situation is a headache. For people running datacenters filled with these disks, it's an outright fiasco.
Constitutional rights and privilege do not extend to school grounds. School administrators and faculty routinely discriminate, silence independent speech, and perform searches and property seizure without warrants or probable cause. And all with the parents' support.
I thought this was common knowledge by now.
I'm trying to find a site to stream the video from on Firefox in Linux.
Somebody recommended Cnet.com, but I don't see any live video there. I thought C-SPAN would be a good bet since their streams are usually terrific (and playable with MPlayer, etc) but their site is too swamped right now to bring up anything but a blue page.
Now, I'm a pretty young whippersnapper (almost 30) but I cannot even recall reading about another presidential election that's generated this much hoopla. From the primaries, to the election, to the inauguration, it's all been full-throttle excitement. And not just from the press, but people on the street as well. Even my bigoted father and step-mother think he's just great.
Is it because:
A) He's the first halfway intelligent president our generation has seen?
B) He has the most fucking fantastic marketing department ever?
C) He's the first not-exclusively-white guy to take office?
D) The Internet is enabling average people to express their opinions and reach out to each other more easily than ever before?
E) Pretty much everyone wants Bush out of the White House, even the most right-leaning republicans?
So are we witnessing history here (and not just because of the race thing) or has there been another presidential election with this much carnival atmosphere to the whole thing? This is a serious question. Ya know, for old people. (And historians.)
Jesus fucking christ, that got modded funny??
This sounds like quite an over-complicated solution. Isn't it possible to design "secure" memory chips that zero their contents when power is first applied? I mean, memory chips are pretty "dumb" (from a design logic perspective, which is why cold-boot attacks work) so how hard would it really be to add this function to the chip? If it significantly adds to the manufacturing cost, sell it as a feature. I know of many agencies and individuals who would be interested in memory that's secure against cold-boot attacks, even if it costs twice per MB as normal chips.
Yes, commissioned salespeople are more motivated. More motivated to blatantly lie about a product's capabilities, the list price of an item, the store's warranty policies, and pretty much anything else they think they can get away with in order to make a sale and get that commission into their hands.
I can usually tell when a salesperson is trying to BS me on a technology-related item. Unfortunately, I'm the corner case. 95% of the people who walk into a Circuit City don't know anything about the products being sold and rely on the salesperson to education them.
And don't get me started on the extended warranty crap. They tried to sell me an extended warranty for a $20 mouse once. I'm normally a very shy person in public, but in that case I couldn't help explaining very slowly to the cashier that an extended warranty for computer mouse was by far the dumbest thing I'd ever heard of and to even mention it was an insult to my intelligence and a clear reflection of theirs.
No sir, I won't be said to see Circuit City go. I just hope whatever springs up in their place isn't even worse.
This case is the perfect example what happens when your predatory business model is threatened to be exposed.
The record companies want to deter people from sharing music, so they make all this fuss about how illegal it is, and how you'll go to jail if you download music for free off the Internet, all the while literally lying to consumers about how copyright really works.
But since they're the ones selling the music, they don't want to look like the bad guys. They want you to be afraid of the police and the court system, not them. That's why they hide behind the RIAA moniker. But the court documents, I've noticed, usually refer to the record companies by name instead of that of their trade association. and they know they'll come out looking really evil to the public and press when the caption on the video stream says, "Sony BMG suing random guy for $1 million over 7 songs".
They only reason that they haven't been heavily penalized yet for all this frivolous litigation is that it hasn't yet caught widespread public attention. And as long as there isn't much of that, they'll keep on doing it.
Because I wasn't the one who picked the schedule. It was the guy who outranked me and was technically therefore my boss.
You know how everyone wanted a Linux-based operating system that "just worked" on a wide variety of hardware with drivers for everything? And didn't throw a shit-fit if you moved the hard disk to a completely different machine and tried to boot it up?
That's why Linux takes so long to boot these days. You can have very good hardware compatibility or you can have very good boot speed. You can't have both. (Well, until someone invents persistent RAM.)
The CD-ROM does respond to the BIOS very quickly. What takes forever is the BIOS checking each controller, chain, and bus location for a device. Waiting for those probes to time out is what takes so long. This isn't just the BIOS either, it's the Linux kernel too and any OS that might want to speak to whatever hardware might happen to be there.
Seems dumb to you, the user. Didn't seem dumb to the programmers who wrote NFS and whatever application you were using. Why? NFS is 1) a block device, and 2) largely a hack. The way UNIX was designed, block devices just don't disappear from the system. Just like wheels (ideally) don't go flying off your car while you're driving down the road. But when NFS, a block device can suddenly go unavailable and as far as the OS is concerned, that's just really really bad for all sorts of reasons. The programmers figured that in order to make the system as robust as possible, they'd extend the timeout as long as tolerable to reduce the chances of data loss and corruption as much as possible. It's conceivable that a large number of problems could be resolved in a matter minutes (say, somebody tripped over the power cord for the network switch), thus preventing the loss of what could be very valuable data.
You click a mouse button. This initiates a request which, after all of the appropriate nameservers have been consulted, hops from your machine over dozens of routers, switches, and cables owned by different countries and corporations. It travels thousands of miles away to some place you can't even pronounce. Once there, the server recognises the request and acts on it, sending you back a mix of static content, images, and database content several orders of magnitude greater in size than your original request. The content then travels back to you another few thousand miles, perhaps via a different path until it eventually reaches your machine where it is processed and displayed in a mostly-legible fashion. And you have the gall to complain that sometimes it takes longer than 10 seconds for all of this to happen?
Good. Fucking. Grief.
I'm continually amazed that it works at all and I'm a sysadmin at a web hosting company. Almost every day I run across a site I want to visit that takes longer than 10 seconds to respond in full. There are lots of very good reasons that a website might take between 10-30 seconds to load in your browser. The authors of the HTTP protocol, web server software, and web browsers having a personal grudge against you sure isn't one of them.
First, presumably the article probably means Wikimedia Commons rather than Wikipedia itself. That said, one of Wikipedia's biggest goals is to have all media content as open and accessible as possible. They accept only free, open, and unencumbered file formats.
YouTube is pretty much the exact opposite of Wikipedia. That is, you cannot download the content for your own use or to redistribute it, there is no open source software that can easily view YouTube content, there is no intelligent discussion of said content (only "omfg americas r soooo dumb"), and nobody except YouTube employees are allowed to express an opinion on whether or not the content is suitable for deletion. And finally, there is no certification that the content being viewed is in the public domain or is being used within the bounds of fair use.
So you want to get rid of the power supply (a device that steps down voltage to 5 and 12 volts) and replace it with a device that steps down the voltage to 5 and 12 volts. Which one of these is not a power supply again? :)
Not really. Take any random computer (especially a server) and the heat generated by the power supply is usually quite a bit less than that generated by the CPU and hard disks. (Put your hand behind a power supply fan and it'll feel quite warm but remember that fan is sucking hot air out of the case that wasn't necessarily generated by the power supply.) The only time a computer power supply really starts to heat up is if it's being pushed to its limit or is highly inefficient, both of which are error conditions rather than normal operation.
I agree 100%. I used to think the KDE/GNOME divide was bad for the Linux desktop. Then KDE4 came out and as much as I'm no big fan of GNOME, I was glad it was there because KDE4 sucked too hard to be my daily desktop. Hopefully 4.2 will bring back the stability and flexibility of 3.5.x, but we'll see.
This doesn't answer the poster's question in the least (hey, this is Slashdot after all), but the wackiest schedule I ever worked was when I was deployed to Turkey in the military for 2 weeks.
There were only three of us to cover one around-the-clock job: a staff sergeant, another airman, and me. The sergeant made it so that both he and the other airman worked two consecutive 12-hour shifts and then had a full day off. The only way you can do that, though, is to make the third guy pull a 12-hour shift with the next 24 hours off with no "break" in the schedule. Think about it: 12 then 24. My work shift (and hence my off-hours) were completely inverted each cycle.
I was definitely pissed about it at first. But it's the military, who am I going to complain to? I went along with it, consoling myself that it was only for two weeks. But man, I gotta tell you, I got used to it in just a few days. You would think that it would be impossible to get used to a schedule where one day you're going to sleep at 6AM and the next day at 6PM, but it worked fine for me because it meant that I got to sleep for 8 hours straight and then wander the base (or do whatever) for another 8. It was because of this schedule that I got to get off base for awhile and go on some tours of the country.
I could almost do that schedule again over here since my sysadmin job doesn't tie me to any specific hours, but my wife would never agree to it. The biggest downfall is that I'd never get a "real" weekend without using up vacation time.
YouTube begs to differ.
As does my father, a private pilot of 15 years.
And of course, I do as well. Someone I used to work with (in I.T.) was not even 20 years old by the time he crashed his first plane. That was during his time off, when he wasn't busy crashing our Cisco routers.
All of them. Even the smallest airfield has at least one non-obstructed entrance to the ramp. They have to so that emergency vehicles can get to the runway if somebody's coming in for a crash landing. Larger airports usually have multiple (albeit guarded) gates.
If you were flying into an airport in one of these "flying cars," there no physical reason you couldn't make your landing, taxi onto the ramp, and then drive off the ramp and onto the road with the rest of the motorists. The main obstruction I see would be procedural. I'm not a pilot, but just as you wouldn't be able to drive to the airport and take right off without filing a flight plan first (per the FAA), I'm pretty sure you wouldn't be able to do the reverse without some paperwork or inspection holding you up for awhile.
You rebuke the accusations with evidence.
I work for a mid-size web hosting company and due to the sheer volume of customers that we have, sometimes we get a couple of unhappy ones that end up making a public forum or blog post badmouthing the company. Our marketing team keeps an eye out for these and tries to work with the disgruntled customer to get the situation resolved and (ideally) make them a happy customer again. If you can't make them happy, then at least you've still come out ahead for trying.
In one case, we had a network outage in the middle of the night that caused about a third of our datacenter to lose outside connectivity for a little over three hours. This prompted one guy to post a video on the web of him ranting and raving for about 15 minutes about how bad our company was. He posted links to it on all the web hosting forums and a couple of his blogs so we found out about it pretty quickly. We were able to publicly debunk literally every claim he made. He said that his server was down all day when in reality he was logged into it just two hours before the outage. He said that his server had to be rebooted daily. Our records show that it was rebooted twice since he owned it. He said that the support staff was rude to him. Our notes show that he almost always demanded to speak to a supervisor whenever he called in. It went on and on. In his own blog, we offered to fix whatever he thought was wrong and give him a year of free hosting (worth several thousand dollars) if he would take the video down. He refused. By the time we threw in the towel, 90% of the comments on his own blog were of other people calling him an idiot and we gained several new customers that day who said they were impressed by our professionalism in that post.
The point here is that except in very rare circumstances, it's possible to rebuke false statements publicly and effectively if they are actually false. I see the threat of libel and defamation suits being used primarily to silence valid criticism and opinion than to "clear the name" of a supposedly aggrieved party. More often than not, the party filing the suit does have something to hide and just want to abuse the court system to harass and intimidate their critics into silence. And unfortunately, it works because libel, slander, and defamation laws trump the First Amendment.
Okay. So what you're saying is that since England, the United States, and Canada were the first developed industrialized countries on the globe, they'll be the first to get thrown back into the third world.
Excuse me if I'm just a little skeptical of that scenario.
Strictly speaking this is true, but it's not a valid defense against criticism.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. There is not just little evidence, there is zero evidence that wifi radio signals affect human physiology in any way.
From my home office I can usually pick up 8 or 9 wifi signals and that's not counting all the other 2.4GHz systems in my home and neighborhood. Practically every square inch of the developed world has anywhere from dozens to thousands of both weak and strong radio signals flying through the air at all times. You just don't know about them because you're not the user of those signals. Office buildings and apartments are perhaps the worst. If wifi were harmful as some say, almost all of the urban population in developed countries would be sick or dead already.
OpenWRT and DD-WRT are third-party firmware for a rather large variety of consumer-level routers and both of them support IPv6.